14 March 2014

Friday

It is often said that there has never been a good war or a bad peace. I disagree with this. There have been many periods of human history that have been called peaceful but which have not constituted peace worthy of the name. We must allow at least the possibility that if a short, decisive war can bring a rapid end to a peace not worthy of the name, and substitute for this something more closely approximating an ideal peace, then such a war would not necessarily be a bad thing. I am not making the claim that such a situation is often exemplified in human history (i.e., “good” wars are not often exemplified, although history has many examples of a bad peace), nor even that when such a condition obtains that it is recognizable by us, but only that it is possible that such a condition obtains.

Yet to focus on war and peace as though they were polar opposites is likely to be counter-productive because misleading. War and peace are related in a way not unlike love and hatred. As we have all heard, it is indifference that is the antithesis of love, not hate. In other words, war and peace lie along a continuum, and a continuum is characterized by a smooth gradation between to opposed states. And so the complexity of history often reveals to us the smooth, imperceptible gradation between war and peace. In escalation, we have the gradual transition from peace to war, and in deescalation we have the gradual transition from war to peace.

The dialectic of war and peace, unfolding as the pendulum of history swings between the poles of war and peace, yields distinct species of war and peace as the development of history forces the realization of each polar concept in turn to take novel forms in the light of unprecedented historical developments. I have elsewhere argued that war is likely an ineradicable feature of civilization (cf. Invariant Properties of Civilization), i.e., the two — war and peace — are locked together in a co-evolutionary spiral so that you cannot have the one without the other.

We would like to think that peace is the equilibrium state to which society returns, and in which equilibrium it remains until this equilibrium is disturbed by war, and that war is a disequilibrium condition which must inevitably give way to the equilibrium condition of peace. This is wishful thinking. Of course, if one is dedicated to this idea one can certainly interpret history in this way, but the fit between the interpretation and the facts is not a good one, and considerable hermeneutical ingenuity must be invested to try to make the interpretation look plausible. In other words, we must tie ourselves in knots in order to try to make this interpretation work; it is not prima facie plausible.

This last point is sufficiently interesting that I would like to pause over it for a moment. I can remember the first time that I came to realize that history is a powerful tool for conveying in interpretation, not a vehicle for the conveyance of facts. History isn’t just an account of the past, a chronicle of names, dates, and places, that only becomes distorted when an historian with an agenda twists the material in order to make it serve a moral, social, or political function. All history, one way or another, conveys an interpretation. I came to this conclusion not from the study of war, but from the study of logic. Some many years ago I was trying to write a comprehensive history of logic, and the more deeply I penetrated into the subject matter from the perspective of the historian that I wanted to be, the more I realized that, no matter how I told the story, it would still be my story.

That all history — including contemporary history — involves interpretation does not make it arbitrary or merely idiosyncratic. The best histories robustly embody the temperament of their authors, and one knows when one is reading what the author’s point of view is, whether or not one agrees with it. This is true of all the great histories from Herodotus to Braudel.

One certainly could write a history of civilization in which peace is an equilibrium condition, from which war is a pathological departure, and this might well be a powerful interpretation of the human condition. One could just as easily write a history of civilization in which war is the equilibrium condition, from which peace is the pathological departure. We have histories such as the first variety, but very few of the second variety, mostly because people simply do not want to believe that war is the norm and peace a suspension of the norm.

Clausewitz famously held that war and peace are two sides of the same coin:

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means. We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the art of war in general and the commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

This is the Clausewitzean continuum: war and peace are what philosophers call polar concepts — concepts that anchor two ends of a single continuum — and each derives its meaning from its contrast with the other. Between the two polar concepts is a graduated continuum in which one is either closer to one end or the other of the continuum, but the positions on the intervening continuum do not perfectly exemplify the polar concepts, which are sometimes idealizations never realized in actual fact.

Whether or not we can transcend this dialectic of polar concepts and attain a realization of civilization that does not derive its meaning from its polar opposite, warfare, will be an inquiry for another time.

8 February 2012

Wednesday

Clausewitz is a philosopher more closely associated with the idea of war than the idea of civilization, but Clausewitz’s conception of war can also shed some light on civilization. Allow me to review some familiar ground in regard to the Clausewitzean conception of war. Here is a famous passage from On War that gives Clausewitz’s famous formulation of war as a continuation of politics by other means:

“…war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the art of war in general and the commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.”

Before this Clausewitz gives a sense of how the military aim and the political aim give way to each other based on the presumed progress of a conflict:

“The law of the extreme, the view to disarm the adversary, to overthrow him, has hitherto to a certain extent usurped the place of this end or object. Just as this law loses its force, the political object must again come forward. If the whole consideration is a calculation of probability based on definite persons and relations, then the political object, being the original motive, must be an essential factor in the product.”

“Civilization and war are born twins. Recently on Twitter I wrote that one could uncharitably say of civilization that is is merely epiphenomenal of war, or one could say more charitably that war is merely epiphenomenal of civilization. Perhaps each is epiphenomenal of the other, and there is no one, single foundation of organized human activity — it is simply that large-scale human activity sometimes manifests itself as civilization and sometimes manifests itself as war.”

“Only the social organization provided by civilization can make organized violence on the scale of war possible. I have even suggested that instead of seeing war and civilization as a facile dichotomy of human experience, we ought to think of large-scale human activity sometimes manifesting itself as civilization and sometimes manifesting itself as war. The two activities are convertible.”

Obviously, this has been on my mind lately. And as unlikely as this may sound, when I was writing these observations I was thinking of a passage in Hermann Weyl’s Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science. In an appendix to this work, after describing the response among mathematicians when Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrated that Hilbert’s program (the finite axiomatization of mathematics) could not be carried out, Weyl wrote:

“The ultimate foundations and the ultimate meaning of mathematics remain an open problem; we do not know in what direction it will find its solution, nor even whether a final objective answer can be expected at all. ‘Mathematizing’ may well be a creative activity of man, like music, the products of which not only in form but also in substance are conditioned by the decisions of history and therefore defy complete objective rationalization.”

A generalization of Weyl’s observation beyond the exclusive concern for creative activities of man might comprehend both creative and destructive activities of man, and that human activity, whatever form it takes, is conditioned by the decisions of history and therefore defies complete objective rationalization. Of course, I doubt even Clausewitz (Enlightenment philosopher of war that he was) would have thought that war transcended history and is amenable to complete objective rationalization, but we must of course think of this in comparative terms: we would have high expectations for mathematics to conform to this ideal, and relatively low expectations for warfare to conform to this ideal, but all human activities would presumably fall on a continuum defined at its end points by that which is entirely immanent to history and that which entirely transcends history. It is the degree of being “conditioned by the decisions of history” that marks the difference between abstract and a priori disciplines like mathematics and concrete and a posteriori disciplines like war.

It would be interesting to construct a philosophy of war based upon the idea that war does in fact transcend the accidents of history and is amenable to complete objective rationalization, but I will not attempt to do that at the present moment (but I will suggest that we might call this, in contradistinction to the political, eschatological, and cataclysmic conceptions of war, the transcendental conception of war). In the meantime, I will assume that war eludes a transcendental theory and must be given a theoretical treatment (if at all) as being “conditioned by the decisions of history” to a greater or lesser extent. Moreover, I will make the same assumption about civilization, which appears to be as “conditioned by the decisions of history” as is the constant warfare that has attended civilized life. Civilization also eludes complete objective rationalization. In this, then, we already see that war and civilization belong to similar spheres of human endeavor, residing near the empirical end of the a priori/a posteriori continuum, while mathematics and logic lie at the opposite end of the same continuum. That is to say, we have similar theoretical expectations for war and for civilization.

Nevertheless, Clausewitz himself points out the continued need to elucidate philosophical truth even from historically contingent events by attending to the essential elements:

“Whoever laughs at these reflections as utopian dreams, does so at the expense of philosophical truth. Although we may learn from it the relations which the essential elements of things bear to each other, it would be rash to attempt to deduce laws from the same by which each individual case should be governed without regard to any accidental disturbing influences. But when a person, in the words of a great writer, “never rises above anecdote,” builds all history on it, begins always with the most individual points, with the climaxes of events, and only goes down just so deep as he finds a motive for doing, and therefore never reaches to the lowest foundation of the predominant general relations, his opinion will never have any value beyond the one case, and to him, that which philosophy proves to be applicable to cases in general, will only appear a dream.”

Clausewitz, throughout his treatise, maintains his focus on the political nature of war as a means to the end of discerning, “the relations which the essential elements of things bear to each other,” and in so doing finds his inquiry led to broader considerations such as, “the general state of intellectual culture in the country” (Bk. 1, Ch. 3, “On Military Genius”), which must be, at least in part, a function of civilization. Clausewitz goes on to say in the same section:

“If we look at a wild, warlike race, then we find a warlike spirit in individuals much more common than in a civilised people; for in the former almost every warrior possesses it; whilst in the civilised, whole masses are only carried away by it from necessity, never by inclination. But amongst uncivilised people we never find a really great general, and very seldom what we can properly call a military genius, because that requires a development of the intelligent powers which cannot be found in an uncivilised state. That a civilised people may also have a warlike tendency and development is a matter of course; and the more this is general, the more frequently also will military spirit be found in individuals in their armies. Now as this coincides in such case with the higher degree of civilisation, therefore from such nations have issued forth the most brilliant military exploits, as the Romans and the French have exemplified. The greatest names in these and in all other nations that have been renowned in war, belong strictly to epochs of higher culture.”

Thus, for Clausewitz, the highest degree of civilization coincides with the highest degree of military genius; high achievement in civilization is the necessary condition for high achievement in war. Military exploits can be the work of genius, like a sculpture of Michelangelo or a fugue by Bach. Brilliance, then, whether expressed in war or in any other endeavor of civilization, requires the achievements of high culture (presumably cultivated by civilization) to reach its ultimate expression.

All of this has been stated — as Clausewitz stated it — giving civilization the priority, but all of these formulations can be inverted ceteris paribus, with war given priority, so that, for example, the highest degree of war coincides with the highest degree of civilizational genius; high achievement in war is the necessary condition for high achievement in civilization. Here we see again, as we have seen before, that war and civilization are convertible. The antithetical view is that war and civilization are not convertible, but antithetical.

It has become a kind of truism — usually unchallenged — in discussing the violence and brutality of the twentieth century to segue into a critique, implicit or explicit, of industrial-technological civilization, which inevitably resulted in the industrialization of war and the application of science and technology to violence and brutality. We find this, for example, in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View, in which he says in regard to the fate of some of Europe’s cultural treasures during the Second World War:

“Many buildings of the eighteenth century were erected simply to give pleasure by people who believed that pleasure was important, and worth taking trouble about, and could be given some of the quality of art. And we managed to destroy a good many of them during the war including the Zwinger at Dresden, the palace of Charlottenburg in Berlin, and the greater part of the Residenz in Wurzburg. As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn’t so difficult to recognize barbarism.”

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 9, pp. 240-241

In a similar vein, after the 1981 Brixton riots Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying, “The veneer of civilization is very thin.” Earlier in the above-quoted work (p. 220), Clark made a related reference that extended his critique from industrialized warfare to industrialized civilization itself:

“…the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism… stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society…”

For Clark, industrialized society and industrialized warfare is transparently barbaric and antithetical to civilization. This is what many of us would like to believe, but in order to believe this we must adopt a systematic blindness of the history of civilization, since war is implicated at every step. In every age of organized human activity, civilization has built monuments to itself, and war has destroyed most of them. A few treasures remain for us from the past, but they are the exception, not the rule. The history of civilization without war is also the exception, not the rule.

We flatter ourselves when we only condescend to give the name of civilization to a certain range of values that we believe reflect well on humanity. This reminds me of the scene in the film Dead Poets Society in which the professor ridicules the overly-refined and delicate way in which Shakespeare is often presented. In the film this is a laugh line, but in real life people really convince themselves civilization is the equivalent of the comedic presentation of Shakespeare.

Even as we attempt to flatter ourselves by associating humanity with a certain selection of values, we also impoverish ourselves. We must convince ourselves, against experience and reason, that civilization is a delicate and fragile thing, rather than the robust reality that it is, forged in war, tried by fire, and built out of sacrifices.

29 January 2012

Sunday

The four horsement of the apocalypse -- war, disease, famine, and death -- constituted a traditional litany of the disasters to which humanity was subject, i.e., the familiar terrors of history.

There is more than one list of exactly those evils represented by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Biblical passage from which the image is derived mentions the horses as being white, red, black, and pale. These have been interpreted as representing conquest, war, famine, and death, though in the Dürer etching above the four horsemen are commonly identified as war, famine, plague, and death.

If we take this latter litany of war, famine, plague, and death as the evils of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it immediately becomes clear that these are not four evils of apocalypse, but one evil intrinsic to the human condition (death) and three evils intrinsic to settled agricultural civilization.

It is settled agricultural civilization itself that is the apocalypse; the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution was at the same time the Agricultural Apocalypse. For in so far as anthropologists and archaeologists have been able to determine, prior to the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, there was no war, no famine, and no plague. There was, of course, death, since death is the human condition, but it was the change in the human condition brought about by settled agricultural civilization that added war, famine, and plague to the human condition.

I have mentioned in several posts that the Paleolithic is sometimes called the Paleolithic Golden Age. It is well known that our hunter-gatherer ancestors, before they settled down into agricultural civilization, had a more diverse and therefore a healthier diet. From this healthier diet followed a healthier life. Individuals were taller and lived longer.

It also seems to be the case that settled agricultural civilization made possible war, famine, and death. I have argued many times that civilization and war are born twins. Only the social organization provided by civilization can make organized violence on the scale of war possible. I have even suggested that instead of seeing war and civilization as a facile dichotomy of human experience, we ought to think of large-scale human activity sometimes manifesting itself as civilization and sometimes manifesting itself as war. The two activities are convertible.

With settled civilization and control of the food supply, our ancestors allowed family sizes to grow — both because it was now possible to raise more children than the parents could physically carry, and because more children meant more farm labor. The entire family could be impressed as a labor gang to work on the farm, which produced surplus food when conditions were favorable. However, when conditions turned unfavorable, there were now many mouths to feed, and they could not be readily moved to another location, having surpassed the numbers that can be realistically transformed into a roving band. The obvious result was famine.

Also with settled civilization came the concentration of growing populations in urban centers and in extending trading networks. These concentrations of human population effectively created disease pools in which both viral agents and bacteriological infections could be easily transmitted through a community in close physical proximity. The obvious result was plague.

While the Industrial Revolution allowed us to transcend many of the institutions of agricultural civilization, the pattern of settled life remains, and with it remains the possibilities of war, famine, and death, which now are part of the human condition, and having lived with them for so long they are also become constitutive of human nature.

19 January 2012

Thursday

Since I last wrote I have experienced a dramatic change in hemispheres, going from the snow of rural Oregon, pictured above from just a few days ago, to the overcast heat and humidity of Lima, Peru. The contrast would have been even more striking had it been as sunny as I expected the southern hemisphere to be in January, but it is still a dramatic hemispherical shift. There is a scene in Goethe’s Faust when Faust requests grapes (or some other fruit — I can’t precisely recall), and Mephistopheles disappears only to return momentarily with the grapes. Although the feat is magical, Faust does not ascribe it to magic, but furnishes the explanation to Faust that on the opposite side of the world it is summer even as it is winter in Faust’s Europe. This is how the man of the Northern Hemisphere views the exotic climes of the Southern Hemisphere.

Even while taking leave of the Northern Hemisphere I have remained within the Western Hemisphere, and I am very pleased to be back in Peru, since it has been almost twenty years since I was last here. Peru is the fons et origo of civilization in the Western Hemisphere. Like Anatolia and Mesopotamia, the history of civilization runs deep here. The succession of peoples and cultures has left stratified layers in time, and this stratigraphy of history gives a definite shape to the past.

The lights of Lima after midnight as seen from my hotel window.

There has also been a succession of empires through the ages. When I was last in Ecuador, at the Hacienda San Agustin — which in its earlier iterations was an Inca outpost on the periphery of empire — the Ecuadorians spoke of the Peruvians as warlike and given to quarrel. I do not know if this is true, but I do know that when they spoke, they spoke with the knowing look of a neighbor on their faces.

We should not be surprised at this. Civilization and war are born twins. Recently on Twitter I wrote that one could uncharitably say of civilization that is is merely epiphenomenal of war, or one could say more charitably that war is merely epiphenomenal of civilization. Perhaps each is epiphenomenal of the other, and there is no one, single foundation of organized human activity — it is simply that large-scale human activity sometimes manifests itself as civilization and sometimes manifests itself as war.

29 December 2011

Thursday

Yesterday in A Review of Iranian Capabilities I mentioned the current foreign policy debate over the idea of a preventative war against Iran and recounted some of Iran’s known capabilities.

Reflecting the these attempts to make a case for or against preventative war with Iran, I was led back in my thoughts to a post I wrote last summer about what I called The Possible War. In this post I tried to emphasize that ex post facto criticisms of conduct in war — like criticisms of the Allies’ strategic bombing of Germany during the Second World War — presume a parity of capability and opportunity that almost never obtains in fact. Military powers do not engage in ideal wars that meet certain standards; they fight the war that they are able to fight, and this is the possible war.

Moving beyond a description of the possible war, the idea can be formulated as a principle, the principle of possible wars, and the principle is this: in any given conflict, each party to the conflict will fight the war that it is possible for that party to fight. In other words, no party to a conflict is going to fight a war that it is impossible for it to fight. In other words again, no party to a conflict is going to fight a losing war on the basis of peer-to-peer engagement if there is a non-peer strategy that will win the war. This sort of thing makes good poetry, as in The Charge of the Light Brigade, but in so far as it ensures failure in a campaign, it exerts a strong negative selection over military powers that pursue such policies.

The military resources of a given political entity (whether state or non-state entity) will always seek to maximize its advantage by employing its most effective means available against its adversary’s most vulnerable target available. This is what makes war brutal and ugly, this is why it has been said since ancient times that inter arma enim silent leges.

There is a sense in which this principle of possible wars is simply an extension of the classic twin principles of mass and economy of forces. Each party to a conflict concentrates as much force as it can at a point it believes the adversary to be most vulnerable, and the enemy is simultaneously trying to do the same thing. If we think of concentration as concentration of effort, rather than mere numbers of battalions, and we think of vulnerability as any way in which an enemy can be defeated, and not merely a point on the line that is insufficiently defended, then we have the principle of possible war.

War is not always and inevitably brutal and ugly, and the principle of possible wars helps us to understand why this is the case. Previously in Civilization and War as Social Technologies I discussed how in particular historical circumstances warfare can become highly ritualized and stylized. There I cited the non-Western examples of Samurai sword fighting, retained in Japan long after the rest of the world was fighting with guns, and the Aztec Flower Battle, which combined religious rituals of sacrifice with the honor and prestige requirements of combat. However, there are Western precedents for ritualized combat as well, as when, in the ancient world, each party to a conflict would choose an individual champion and the issue was decided by single combat.

Another example of semi-ritualized forms of combat in Western history might include early modern Condottieri wars in the Italian peninsula. Before the large scale armies of the French and the Spanish crossed the Alps to pillage and plunder Italy, the peninsula was dominated by wealth city-states who hired mercenary armies under Condottieri captains to wage war against each other. With two mercenary armies facing each other on the battlefield, there was a strong incentive to minimize casualties, and there are some remarkable stories from the era of nearly bloodless battles.

Another example would be the maneuver warfare of small, professional European armies during the Enlightenment, who sometimes managed to fight limited wars with a minimal impact on non-combatants. This may well have been a cultural response to the horrific slaughter of the Thirty Years War.

In these latter two examples, limited wars were the possible war because a sufficient number of social conventions and normative presuppositions were shared by all parties to the conflict, who were willing to abide by the results of the contest even when a more ruthless approach might have secured a Pyrrhic victory. Under these socio-political conditions, limited wars were possible wars because all parties recognized that it was in their enlightened self-interest not to escalate wars beyond a certain threshold. Such social conventions touching even upon the conduct of war can only be effective in a suitably homogenous cultural region.

After the escalating total wars leading up to the middle of the twentieth century, limited wars emerged again out of fear of crossing the nuclear threshold. Parties to the conflicts were willing to abide by the issue of these limited wars because the alternative was mutually assured destruction. Also, all parties to proxy wars knew they would have another chance at achieving their goals in another theater when the proxy war would shift to another region of the world. Thus limited wars because possible wars because the alternative was unthinkable.

26 May 2009

Contradictory concepts are locked in a dialectical relation. Logically, this means that a definition of a given concept yields the definition of its contradictory through negation. If war is the contradictory of peace, and peace the contradictory of war, then a negation of a definition of war yields a definition of peace, and a negation of a definition of peace yields a definition of war.

Things are rarely as simple as this in fact; this kind of conceptual neatness is rare. Concepts — especially old concepts with a long history — tend to be complex and to be related by implication to many other concepts. Conceptual pairs like war and peace — sometimes called polar concepts — are assumed to be contradictories when they are in fact richer in content and the polar concepts imply more than each other. And what concepts could be older than those of war and peace? The emergence of civilization is nearly identical with the emergence of war in human history, and the idea of peace emerges as a hope immediately following upon the depredations of war.

Thus war and peace are not precisely dialectical, not precisely definable in terms of the contradictory of the other. This in itself renders war and peace as dialectical concepts, as any attempt to think them through coherently and systematically engages the thinker in an attempt to reconciling internal tensions within the concept. If successful, this process yields a higher synthesis that transcends the limited perspective and scope of previous definitions of the concept and establishes a more comprehensive concept informed by previous conceptions but more adequate than earlier formulations.

The Dialectic of Conceptual Pairs

Conceptual pairs, like war and peace, that are apparently or superficially contradictory yet integral in fact are common in our intellectual experience. A few weeks ago I mentioned Romero’s distinction between doctrinaire and inorganic democracy. This is a great example of what I am trying to illustrate. What we have are two clusters of concepts that suggest in turn two further contradictory clusters. Doctrinaire democracy is contradicted by non-doctrinaire democracy (each can be defined as the negation of the other), while inorganic democracy is contradicted by organic democracy (which, again, can each be defined as the negation of the other). Thus doctrinaire and inorganic democracy stand in a problematic relationship to each other, as do non-doctrinaire and organic democracy. But systematically setting these concepts within a theoretical context that includes them all may help to illuminate the initial pair of concepts with which we began.

In my Political Economy of Globalization I made similar observations regarding the dialectic of the conceptual pair of globalism and localism:

Globalism is correctly understood as one half of a dialectic, that of globalism and localism, or globalism and tribalism. And this extension of the concept of globalism to the pair of concepts globalism/tribalism emphasizes the departure from twentieth century nationalism that is already becoming a fact of political life: the nation-state appears nowhere in this dialectic. However, the concept of globalism is also extended by another dialectic: that of advocacy and opposition, or globalism/anti-globalism…

Thus the pair of concepts, globalism and anti-globalism, extends the concept of globalism simpliciter, so that the only obvious permutation missing in this twice extended concept of globalism is that of anti-tribalism, and it is here, finally, that we recover the nation-state. For the nation-state is an undeclared anti-tribalism: personal loyalty to chieftain must be abolished so that a territorial loyalty to the nation-state can take its place.

There I also cited section 2 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

“How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-interest? Or the pure sunlike gaze of the sage out of covetousness? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, even worse; the things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this turmoil of delusion and desire! Rather from the lap of being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the ‘thing-in-itself ’—there must be their basis, and nowhere else!”— This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this kind of valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this “belief” that they trouble themselves about “knowledge,” about something that is finally christened solemnly as “the truth.” The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in antithetical of values.

What could be more true of the opposites of war and peace? The faith in antithetical values has encouraged us to believe that war and peace are precisely contradictory, but we have seen that the concepts are more complex than that.

The Means and Ends of War

We can easily see how the concept of peace might emerge from the concept of war, or vice versa, from Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as the pursuit of politics by other means. Clausewitz restates this principle throughout On War and gives it several formulations, so that it constitutes a point of reference for his thought and is the locus classicus for what Anatol Rapoport called political war (in contradistinction to eschatological war and catastrophic war).

This Clausewitzian principle inevitably invited the formulation of its inversion by Foucault: “politics is the continuation of war by other means.” (“Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, p. 15) Thus politics, ideally peaceful, can be transformed into war, and war can be transformed into peace.

In holding that war is the pursuit of politics by other means, Clausewitz implicitly invokes the ends/means distinction, and suggests that the end, aim, and goal of war and politics alike is the same; only the means are different. War is the use of military means — violence — to compel another to do our will, whereas politics employs diplomatic means in the attempt to compel another to do our will. Seen in this context of means and ends, the transformation of war into peace and peace into war becomes obvious. Politicians pursue their ends with diplomacy, and finding the result unsatisfying turn to force in the attempt to attain the same ends. The use of force either attains these ends satisfactorily, in which case the war ends, or the ends are not attained, and eventually the war ends because it is seen as ineffectual in attaining the desired ends, and the politicians return to diplomacy in the attempt to secure that which could be be gotten by force.

Omnipresent War

Recent history has been rich in indecisive conflicts — the Colombian civil war, the Lebanese civil war, and the recently settled Sri Lankan civil war — in which the combatants have gone between peace table and battlefield as though through a revolving door. In such contexts, “peace” means little, and the temporary absence of armed conflict is only called peace for lack of a better term.

In so far as peace is an ideal — and we are well familiar with this ideal from literature and art — and not merely the cessation of hostility or the temporary absence of armed conflict, the greater part of the world for the greater part of history have not known peace. It was a tradition among the Romans that the doors to the Temple of Janus — called the Gates of War — would be closed in time of peace. This is said to have happened only five times in the combined history of the Republic and the Empire.

17 May 2009

Sunday

A rare early color photograph of WWI: the machine gun was one of the transformative technologies of the First World War.

The First World War is one of the great catastrophes of Western history. This is insufficiently appreciated today. The Second World War appears to be the pivot of the twentieth century, occurring near the center of the century, a war fought on a larger scale and with more advanced technology and over a greater swath of the world. And while all of this is true, and the Second World War was the pivot of the twentieth century, the First World War was the pivot of something even larger than the twentieth century.

Along with the machine gun, barbed wire shaped the combat of the First World War.

The First World War was contemplated as a brief war, planned as a brief war, and started (or triggered, if you prefer) with the intention of being a brief war. Instead, it lasted years and consumed the lives the millions. Unlike the Second World War, the dead and wounded were overwhelmingly soldiers, and the war was primarily fought in the countryside of Europe, not in its cities. Thus the First World War was, in a particular sense, less destructive than the Second World War. But that particular sense is a material sense; in a moral or social sense, it could be maintained that the Frist World War was the more destructive.

The tank was another transformative technology, but it had to wait for the Second World War for its successful exploitation.

We all know that with the outbreak of the First World War, weapons and technology had changed while tactics had not yet caught up. And we have all heard that these innovations in warfare favored the defense and thus resulted in the static trench warfare for which the First World War is notorious.

Industrialization came late to war as compared to other aspects of life in Western civilization. It transformed the technology of war with machine guns and barbed wire, and it took several decades for the social technology of war to fully exploit the hardware technologies of war. The exploitation of the social technology of modern war was to be felt with the onset of the Second World War and the use of Blitzkrieg. (I have written briefly of this in The Dialectic of Stalemate.)

In my Social Consensus in Industrialized Society I suggested that the Industrial Revolution forced society to change in response, and that the Western world had responded twice with social arrangements attempting to accommodate the changes forced by industrialization and was still groping toward a third paradigm of social organization following the collapse of the earlier attempts. The social technologies of war — what military thinkers call “doctrine,” as in “armor doctrine” — exhibit a similar pattern of groping for an effective way to utilize hardware technologies. The trench warfare and mass assaults on fixed positions of the First World War represents the first attempt to incorporate novel military technologies. Blitzkrieg represents the second attempt. The challenge posed by unconventional, asymmetrical, and guerrilla warfare, and the responses to these threats on the part of conventional military forces, represents yet a third attempt to converge upon a military doctrine adequate to contemporary hardware technology.

One aspect of social technology and organization that made the First World War such a catastrophe was an ethos of industrialized society that found its expression in universal conscription and mobilization. In the pre-modern and early modern world, war was a business for professional soldiers. There was a nearly absolute social division between the mass of the population and professional soldiers. This division was effaced by the emergence of popular sovereignty as the sole form of political legitimacy after the American and French revolutions.

With industrialization, urbanization, and democratization, all men were asserted to be equal, and in some rare cases were actually treated as such. If all men were equal before the law, all men were equally obligated to fight for “their” country, for the masses now had a stake in the political outcome that they had never had in the pre-modern era. Thus emerged the idea of every man a soldier.

There is a sense in which this is truly ludicrous: not every man is suitable to be a soldier; not every man is fit for killing. But the newly industrialized armies were like an enormous machine constructed to consume vast numbers of men, as the newly established factory system drew vast numbers of men from the countryside into the city and consumed them in factories and machine works and workshops.

Mass man emerged in a terribly real sense during the First World War. With urbanization and concentration of vast populations rapidly mobilized by industrialized social infrastructure, the generals had literally millions of men at their disposal. Not knowing any better, they launched mass attacks that achieved little except mass casualties.

The idea of every man a soldier is as unrealistic as the idea — once advanced as the inevitable result of industrialization’s increasing living standards and decreasing work hours — of every man a man of leisure or every man an artist, or, for that matter, every man a wage earner (the present paradigm of industrial society), every man a yeoman farmer (Jeffersonian democracy), or every man a peasant (the reality of pre-modern, pre-industrialized civilization).

27 April 2009

Monday

This morning on twitter I jotted down a few quick notes that partially reflect the fact that I am presently listening to a couple different books about war: Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden, by Marshall de Bruhl, and A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954 – 1962, by Alistair Horne.

As I was capturing a few thoughts about contemporary warfare, it dawned on me that my thoughts on war can be given an interesting Marxist formulation. If there is anyone who reads this forum on a regular basis you will know that, despite my clear differences with Marx, I often end up citing and quoting him, and I will further develop my quasi-Marxist reflections today.

One of the features of Marx’s thought that retains its value despite the problematic nature of so much Marxist theory is that of the distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure. There should be a name for this distinction and the view of society that it implies, but I am not sufficiently up on Marxist studies to know if there is a term that is commonly used within the discipline, so at present I will refer to it as “the economic interpretation of history”.

I wrote about this last week in relation to Joseph Campbell’s use of the phrase, and there I said that I didn’t know exactly what Campbell meant by it. Well, this is as good a meaning as any for the phrase, and indeed I think it sums up the idea Campbell meant to criticize quite nicely. We could even say (with a certain flourish) that the fundamental theorem of the economic interpretation of history is that the ideological superstructure of a society is completely determined by the economic base of the same society.

This uncompromising statement of the fundamental theorem of the economic interpretation of history is a perfect instance of reductionism as well as of constructing a theoretical absolute. Reductionism is mostly out of favor among contemporary thinkers, though it is not without its advocates, and constructing a theoretical absolute can be little different than erecting a straw man. There are obvious re-formulations of this theorem that are far less rigid, and thus far more likely to be true, or, at least, to have some truth in them. For example, we could say that the economic interpretation of history is the principle that ideological superstructure is mostly determined, or somewhat determined, by economic base. Or, hedging even more, that ideological superstructure is determined at least in part by economic base. It would be foolish to deny the latter outright, so we see that between an absolutist and uncompromising statement of a principle, and a thoroughly hedged statement there can be the difference between night and day.

But rather than conditionalize, compromise, or hedge, I would like to go in the direction of greater abstractness and generality. In other words, I would like, for the moment, to pursue an even more thorough-going reductionism, all in the interest of philosophical principle.

When thinking about it this morning, I was struck by the obvious fact that Marx’s formulation of the economic interpretation of history can be generalized. Rather than limiting our foundations to economic foundations, any social system whatever can be seen as the social base of a society, while any cultural or intellectual expression of a people is a wider field of ambition than political ideology in the narrow sense. Thus a generalization of Marx’s principle would be that social conditions determine the life of the mind. Once again, if we hedge and say, “Social conditions, at least in part, determine the life of the mind,” we have a proposition with which few will disagree.

Now, to war. War is one form of social organization. Indeed, it is a pervasive form of social organization throughout human history. There are important respects in which war is an expression of human culture. It is then to be expected that the social conditions of a society at war are expressed in the methods by which that society makes war.

Since the end of the Second World War, there was been much discussion of strategic bombing. An explicitly philosophical treatise has been written to denounce it as immoral (A. C. Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime?). Caleb Carr denounces it in his The Lessons of Terror. Firestorm, mentioned above, questions the utility and rationale of strategic bombing. But, if I am at least partly right, it is misleading to try to understand strategic bombing in exclusively moral or political terms. Strategic bombing is an expression of our culture.

"What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin." Hannah Arendt

Once we see it in this context, it seems rather obvious. Hannah Arendt is especially remembered for her argument that twentieth century totalitarianism and fascism is a political outcome of the emergence of mass man in history. I would argue that mass warfare is also a nearly inevitable historical outcome of the emergence of mass man. Today we have mass war for mass man. It may be horrific, but it is not to be treated as some kind of anomaly: this style of warfare perfectly matches the structure of society today.

. . . . .

For the record, below are my Twitter posts from this morning, laying the above out with a certain succinctness:

1. Influencing policy through mass terror could have no place before popular opinion was crucial to the formulation of policy.

2. The limited war of earlier ages corresponded to the drastically limited sovereignty of non-democratic institutions.

3. Where vox populi is law, to shift the feeling or perceptions of the people, through terror or other means, is a coherent strategy.

4. Twentieth century campaigns of mass death and strategic bombing are brought into being (not justified) by popular sovereignty.

5. The ideological superstructure of modern war (mass war) supervenes upon the social and economic base of modern human life (mass man).